A six-year-old boy finds a fossil in his garden and nobody knows how to report it

Finding your first fossil can be a wonderful experience, unforgettable for many. What you hold in your hand in that moment is something that nobody else has seen, an object which has been untouched, hidden away for millions upon millions of years. Each fossil has its own story to tell about the life of a long-extinct organism, its death and burial, the processes which occurred to turn life into rock, the constantly-changing landscape which led from this remnant of ancient life being buried deep underground, only to be thrust back up to the surface where erosion allowed it to eventually be found. We can place each fossil in its evolutionary context, part of the ongoing story of life on Earth. We can place each fossil in its geographical context, tracing it back to a world very different from ours, often in oceans where now there is land, as sea levels rose and fell, climates fluctuated, and continents drifted. Some carry that feeling with them whenever they find a new fossil, knowing that every new find is a unique mark of prehistoric life.

There is a story doing the rounds today about a six-year-old boy from Walsall (UK) who found a fossil whilst digging in his garden. It’s a nice, feel-good story and I hope that it helps ignite a passion for fossils in the young lad, along with the potential to get others interested in finding their own fossils. However, the story is lacking some important details which would make it useful. The reporting has been exceptionally sloppy, with each article I’ve found repeating the same information and not bothering to do any simple fact checking.

Image credit: Vish Singh/PA

The Portsmouth Uni palaeo course is 25 this year, allow me to reflect a little

It’s come to my attention that my old university, the University of Portsmouth, is celebrating 25 years of its palaeontology course, the first of its kind in the country, and, if I’m not mistaken, resulted in a creationist museum opening in the city. I visited Genesis Expo whilst studying down there, I’m kind of sad that it closed down as it was so bad that it was entertaining. As a graduate of the Palaeontology BSc, I want to reflect on the things mentioned in the video put out by the university last month.

I graduated back in 2012 on what was then called the Palaeobiology and Evolution BSc, so I can’t really say how much the course has changed since my time there; I’ll stick to my own experiences of the course rather than the course content.

Rugby? Baseball? Vertebrate origins? When sports metaphors complicate science writing

It’s the final ten minutes of a rugby (union) match, you’ve just been awarded a penalty in a kickable position in your opponent’s half and you’re four points down, do you take the easier three points or do you kick for the corner? Don’t worry if that made no sense to you, it was meant to only make sense to people who just happen to enjoy rugby, and I have no idea how many people love both palaeontology and rugby, or are interested in science writing and rugby. That’s part of the point. I’m also writing this over what should have been the final weekend of the 6 Nations competition, so I’ve got rugby on the brain (one match had to be rearranged due to players testing positive for Covid-19, so the usual Super Saturday is not the end this year).

Johnny Wilkinson lining up a penalty for England against Scotland. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/theedinburghblog/2322198326

There are a number of ways to score points in rugby union. A penalty, when kicked between the posts, awards three points and is often the safe option if the team has a good kicker. A try, where the ball is touched down over the opponent’s try line, awards five points and gives the team’s kicker a chance to score a conversion for a further two points (called a converted try), which again involves kicking the ball between the posts. When a team is awarded a penalty, they can choose to go for the posts if they are close enough, or they can kick it into touch (off the field of play at the side of the pitch) and can take a line-out (a type of throw in) from a better attacking position, which in this scenario would mean that they have the confidence to try to score a try and win the game in one go, rather than take the easier three points and hope to score again before time is up.

In this metaphor, taking the easier three points and hoping to score again represents science writing without using metaphors, particularly sports metaphors. It’s safer as it doesn’t risk alienating readers who are unable to follow the metaphor, and it doesn’t require understanding something potentially obscure – science can be difficult enough to communicate without having to force the reader to try to work out the rules (called laws in rugby) of a particular sport – but it can also risk boring the audience and losing them. Kicking for the corner is high-risk high-reward and so is using sports metaphors. If it works, it can turn a potentially dry science story into something with a bit of life. If it fails, it makes the science even harder to understand. Good science writing prevents the reader from needing to look things up, whether it’s scientific terminology or the ins and outs of a metaphor.

Conisbrough Castle reviewed

I’ve spent the majority of my life living a stone’s throw away from a Norman castle, the inspiration behind Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and a place I visit often, usually just to get a few pictures to stick on Instagram. I can even see the round keep from my bedroom window in the place I’m currently living. Conisbrough Castle, built in the 12th century, sits on the outskirts of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, and was constructed from local Permian limestones which are remarkably lacking in fossils, sadly, so it’s not a good place to do a bit of urban fossil hunting (a hobby I intend to write about again soon). I have found fossils in the walls there, though they were very difficult to hunt down.

I love that castle, I want everyone to visit it even if they end up not liking it, just as a minority of reviewers on Google didn’t like it. I decided to take some of my favourite bad reviews and add them to pictures I’ve taken of the castle over the years. I should be in marketing…

They are relatively low resolution as I made them with the Facebook mobile app in mind.

It gets smaller as you move away from it as well

The Texas newspaper which dabbled in creationism

A few days ago I saw an Independent article covering something which I thought I might write about. The article was titled Texas newspaper publishes editorial claiming humans and dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same time. I felt like the blog post would practically write itself, after all, young earth creationism is an easy target, it’s easy to debunk and it should really receive any press coverage, even in an op-ed for a newspaper with around 3,000 readers.

I planned on maybe talking about why editors shouldn’t publish anti-science articles by Meals on Wheels directors, though I don’t think they should publish such articles by people with science degrees either. The Independent article mentioned that the author referenced pictures on cave walls which looked like dinosaurs, and the carvings on the Babylonian Ishtar Gate, some things I could potentially have quickly exposed.

I even thought that I might use this as a chance to mention what every palaeontologist likes to drop into conversation whenever the opportunity arises – that dinosaurs and humans do live side by side, as birds are dinosaurs. But it seems pointless to put that much effort in now that I do have a chance to write about it.

Why bait COVID deniers when Mars is right there? An eye-catching press release title which didn’t go viral

Mainstream news constantly shifts its focus, with new topics cycling in and out of the public’s immediate attention. Some go on to dominate, constantly bombarding us with relevant updates whilst smaller news items disappear quickly. When a story monopolises the news, new terminology becomes widely heard and enters the public lexicon. With the news cycle currently focusing on all things COVID, the term false positive has been thrown around a lot, particularly when testing was becoming more widely available. COVID deniers leapt on the concept of the false positive, where a test could come back with a positive result despite not actually detecting the virus. Their understanding of false positives was lacking but this did not prevent those two words from spreading in tandem, often found in the comments sections of any coronavirus-related article. So it came as a bit of a surprise to see this phrase being used in the title of a press release on an obscure bit of palaeontology.

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-early-life-full-false-positives.html

Seeing this had me wondering whether they have intentionally used a phrase which is currently in vogue, particularly with COVID deniers, in order to get more attention. It’s not out of the question, though it could just be coincidence as the phrase is a common scientific term, despite not appearing in the paper’s title or abstract. I wanted to take a quick look at whether this abstract title got the attention of any news sites, what angle those sites took, and present what I think could have been a better approach to take if publicity was their aim.

Why should space matter to fossil nerds?

I’m not an astronomer by any means, not even an amateur, I don’t even own a proper telescope. Yet lately I seem to be writing about space quite a lot. I’ve drawn a couple of pictures about space and I’ve written some posts on the subject, though I wouldn’t consider myself to be that well informed. It’s just that space can actually be quite relevant to palaeontology.

I recently saw a post on Facebook about Perseverance rover (which I’ve also written about) and was shocked to see someone in the comments claiming to be a scientist (a chemist if I remember correctly) as. they saw any sort of space exploration as a waste of funding. They believed that we need to focus on the conservation of our own planet and fighting climate change. What made it even worse to read, for me personally, was that this person also claimed to have studied a lot of palaeontology during their degree. I feel like the overlap between palaeontology and astronomy provides excellent insight into the interconnectedness of science and how disparate fields can affect one another. I’m going to keep this very brief as I feel like it shouldn’t really need saying.